Abélard himself merely says that he ‘went wherever dialectics flourished.’ For five or six years he wandered from school to school, drawn onward continually by the fame of schools and of masters. Schools were plentiful, and the age was already rich in great teachers. Charlemagne had inaugurated the scholastic age two hundred years before with the founding of the Palace School, and had directed that every monastery and every episcopal town should give instruction. With periods of languor the Benedictines had sustained the scholastic tradition through the soulless age that followed, and the second half of the eleventh century saw a brisk development. There was the great abbey of Bec, in Normandy, where St. Anselm still detained crowds of pupils after the departure of Lanfranc. But at Bec the students were not part of a ‘great undisciplined horde,’ as Rashdall calls the students of the early Middle Ages. With its careful regulations, its bare-back castigations, its expurgated classics, and its ever watchful monks, it contrived at once to cultivate the mind (in moderation) and to guard the sanctity of faith and morals. Cluny, in the south, had a similar school at its gates, and the same control of the scholars it lodged and fed. St. Denis, near Paris, had another famous Benedictine school. The forty monasteries that William of Dijon had recently reformed had opened free schools for the wandering pupils, and even fed the poorer youths. Then there were men of European fame teaching in the cathedral cloisters of the larger towns. At Chartres, good Bishop Ivo—the only lawyer who ever lived and died in the odour of sanctity—had spent much energy in the improvement of his school. Little John, or John of Salisbury, has left us a proud record of its life at a slightly later date, when Tirric and his brother Bernard presided over it. At Tournai, Master Eudes of Orleans, the peripatetic of the time, walked the cloisters all day with his questioning scholars, and gathered them before the cathedral door of an evening to explain the profound mysteries of the solid spheres that whirled overhead, and of the tiny, immortal fires that were set in them. Other famous episcopal schools were those of Tours, Rheims, Angers, and Laon. But every bishop had his master or masters for the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics (the _trivium_), and in the larger towns were ‘lectors’ of the other four liberal arts (the _quadrivium_), music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. Theology was taught under the watchful eye of the bishop and his chapter, and in time chairs of Hebrew, and, with the progress of the Saracenic invasion of the intellectual world, even of Arabic, were founded. At the abbey of St. Denis, monk Baldwin, sometime physician to the King of England, taught and practised the art of healing. At Chartres, also, medicine was taught somewhat later; and there are stories of teachers of law. And beside all these, there were the private masters, ‘coaches,’